And the miracle of today

How many shoes tall are you?

Since buying tickets to Rwanda and things starting to solidify, I’ve been real busy making plans, buying more tickets and more insurance and making more plans. And telling everyone about what I think I’ll be doing there.

My first plane leaves Portland Oct 7 for Washington DC for a 16 hour layover. Fly out the next day. 12.5 hours to Ethiopia (yet it takes 17 hours on the way back) and then a nice short 4 hour layover before the last 4 hour flight into Kigali and my home for the next 7 weeks, hangin out with Lori (one of the African Road founders) and falling in love with Africa.

The first week is spent learning about how they Farm God’s Way in Uganda. Christianity and especially Roman Catholicism having a strong presence in Rwanda and Africa in general, so Farming God’s Way is essentially what we would call Organic Farming. Cool! The next week will be spent working with the Togetherness Farm (where the orphans have been growing their own food). Then it’s off to Kenya and Burundi October 24 to November 10 with the trip African Road has organized [and you could join us on]. After the trip it will be Lori and me back to business. It sounds like they will put me to work at the farm, the preschool and the women’s cooperative before the trip, then afterwards, the next 2 weeks I’ll be working with whichever group was the best match.

Writing it all out, it doesn’t seem like I’ll be gone very long at all! Just long enough to completely empty the bank account!

Today the local elementary school invited me to tell them about my plans. It was fun to be able to show them where tiny little Rwanda was, wrapped up in the middle of the other 54 (or is it 52?) African nations. Really I went to tell them about it because I wanted their shoes. No, not in a wierd, creepy shoe fetish kinda way. There seems to be a shoe famine there. So my two bags are going to be filled with shoes for those soccer lovin boys and girls. They were so excited when they found out they could help me that they had ten times more questions about the types of shoes they could bring than they did about Rwanda or African Road. Which was probably a really good thing since I am not entirely sure what my role will be and only know a bit about the people and culture from the one book I’ve picked up.

Best questions asked:

Can you take toys? I bet they already have toys. I bet they use cow bones.

Do they drink milk?

Can you say anything in their language? (Which means I’ll have to learn how to say ‘Sarah’s awesome’ in Kenyarawandi)

Can you take my old boots?

And the last question from the day, my favorite: If you can take 50lbs of shoes, I’m 50 inches tall. So you’re taking as many shoes as I am tall!

That kid was great. And after digging potatoes the rest of today, is it wrong to wonder how many inches of little boy I dug up today?